By Dr. Brenna Spray, MHT/MHAA Outreach Coordinator
Left: Clara Barton House from Survey HABS MD-300 (LOC); Right: front façade and second floor stair well looking at the floating third floor level.
As a Girl Scout in Maryland, my visit in the early 2000s to the Clara Barton House (M: 35-25) in Glen Echo to this day remains one of my favorite field trips, not only because learning about Clara Barton’s bravery and ingenuity stuck with me through the last 25 years but I’m also still trying to figure out the physics of the floating room on the third floor (which has apparently been fascinating children since at least 1988). Dr. Julian Hubbel, a field agent of the American Red Cross and a friend of Miss Barton. designed the unusual “Steamboat Gothic” Victorian house, built in 1897, to create an interior that feels like you’re in a riverboat. Now that I know that the Historic American Buildings Survey exists, and I have access to the house’s beautiful and detailed drawings, how the room is suspended in midair is a little less mysterious. This room, known as the “Captain’s Room,” sits at the front of the home, where on a sunny day light will pour through the Red Cross window at its center.
Left: Clara Barton House Third Floor Survey HABS MD-300 Drawing (LOC); Right: Red Cross windows (NPS)
That day, the girls in my troop joined the hundreds of thousands of other people that had visited, and continue to visit, the National Historic Landmark since Congress designated the property a national historic site in 1974 and opened it to the public. The museum has continued to grow and expand, and the site is currently planning a major rehabilitation project to make repairs and upgrades for health, safety, and increased visitation. MHT’s Project Review and Compliance team has been working with the National Park Service to review proposed changes to the site and help avoid, minimize, or mitigate any harm to the property.
Becoming Clara Barton
Born Clarissa Harlowe Barton, Clara Barton is most famous for her career as a nurse and the founder of the American Red Cross but first started as a teacher at age 18 in Massachusetts. It was here that she founded a school at her brother’s mill at age 24, and then seven years later established the first free school in Bordentown, New Jersey. She resigned, however, when she found out that the school hired a man and paid him twice her salary stating she “may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, [she] shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.” [7] She moved to Washington, DC, where she became the first woman hired as a recording clerk at the US Patent Office and was paid the same as her male colleagues. However, Secretary of the Interior Robert McClelland opposed women working in government, so her position was reduced to copyist and then eventually eliminated.
While we didn’t hear these stories on our fieldtrip, they show the foundations of the woman who would go on to live a life helping people in conflict, even when she was surrounded by people who did not think she was capable. When the Civil War broke out, she brought supplies to the 6th Massachusetts Infantry, who had been attacked in Baltimore and were housed in the unfinished Capitol building. She realized then that, while her effort was beneficial, she was truly needed on the battlefields where the suffering would be greatest. She obtained passes from government leaders to bring her volunteers, services, and medical supplies to battlefields and field hospitals, eventually becoming the “Angel of the Battlefield” at Cedar Mountain, Fairfax Station, Chantilly, Harpers Ferry, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Charleston, Petersburg, and Cold Harbor. She often would pull ahead of the medical units, bringing relief while the battles raged around her, caring for Union and Confederate troops alike.
She showed great interest in the men she cared for, to the point that she found herself in a position to help locate missing men for families who wrote to her. After the Civil War, with the permission of President Abraham Lincoln, established the Office of Correspondence with Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army, where she and her assistants received and answered over 63,000 letters from her rooms at 437 7th St NW in Washington, DC. Over the course of four years, they identified over 22,000 missing men, and, to this day, the Red Cross’ tracing service remains one of its most valued activities. In 1996, over 100 years after the office opened, an employee of the General Services Administration conducted a routine inspection of 437 7th St NW, which was still owned by the federal government, before a planned demolition. He discovered an envelope hanging out of the ceiling, leading to an exploration of the attic and the discovery that this building had been Clara Barton’s “Missing Solders Office.” Today, that building is also a museum, one of three sites operated by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick.
The American Red Cross
What I did learn all about as a young Girl Scout on my visit to Clara Barton’s home was her integral role in the establishment of the American Red Cross. Looking for rest and relaxation after the Civil War, Barton visited Europe in 1869, where she read A Memory of Solferino by Henry Dunant, the Swiss founder of the Red Cross, where he called for “international agreements to protect the sick and wounded during wartime without respect to nationality and for the formation of national societies to give aid voluntarily on a neutral basis.” [2] It is thanks to Dunant and these ideas that we today have the Geneva Convention (then known as the Geneva Treaty), and thanks to Barton championing the treaty that the United States ratified it in 1882.
Barton returned to the US and founded the American Red Cross. The organization’s first congressional charter was signed in 1900 and the second in 1905, with the most recent signed in 2007. Disaster relief was the primary focus of the American Red Cross in its first years, with relief efforts focused on aiding forest fire victims and survivors of a dam break, assisting Russians suffering from famine, hurricane and tidal wave relief in South Carolina and Texas, as well as relief operations in Turkey and Armenia, where Barton was the sole woman and only Red Cross advocate Turkish government allowed. The house in Glen Echo served as her home and the organization’s headquarters until her death in 1912.
After Clara Barton, the American Red Cross grew exponentially due to the World Wars, and women continued to play pivotal roles as nurses serving on the front lines, in field hospitals, evacuation hospitals, and on hospital trains, ships, and transport planes. Red Cross women took part in particular: the Gray Ladies, who provided non-medical care and companionship to wounded soldiers during World Wars I and II; the American Red Cross Motor Corps, whose volunteers drove millions of miles transporting supplies, patients, and evacuees, including during the Pearl Harbor attack; and the Canteen Service, which served millions of meals during World War I. This Women’s History Month, we celebrate Clara Barton, who made it all possible.
References
[1] American Red Cross. Founder Clara Barton. https://www.redcross.org/content/dam/redcross/enterprise-assets/about-us/history/history-clara-barton-v3.pdf.
[2] Barton, Clara. “The Women Who Went to the Field.” www.nps.gov/clba/learn/historyculture/fieldpoem.htm.
[3] “Clara Barton.” American Battlefield Trust, 9 Aug. 2018, www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/clara-barton.
[4] Goeldner, Paul. Clara Barton National Historic Site (M: 35-25). 1979. https://apps.mht.maryland.gov/medusa/PDF/Montgomery/M%3B%2035-25.pdf
[5] Michals, Debra. “Clara Barton.” National Women’s History Museum, National Women’s History Museum, 2015, www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/clara-barton.
[6] “Our Story .” Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum, 2025, clarabartonmuseum.org/ourstory/.
[7] “Virtual Museum Exhibit.” Clara Barton National Historic Site, www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/clba/work.html.
